DARK SOULS™ II

I've gone back and forth on Dark Souls II more times than any other game in the FromSoftware catalogue, which is honestly a compliment. The debate around it never dies because the game itself refuses to be neatly categorized. It is not just a retread of the first Dark Souls, and the players who went in expecting that in 2014 have been arguing on forums ever since. What you actually get is an action RPG set in the decaying kingdom of Drangleic, built around a more experimental design philosophy that makes it feel genuinely distinct from its predecessor, for better and for worse. On the better side: build variety here is, arguably, the widest in the trilogy. Powerstancing, which lets you wield two compatible weapons simultaneously for unique attack strings, is a mechanic that the community still mourns having lost in later entries. The Soul Vessel item lets you respec your stats mid-playthrough, so experimenting with a hexes build or swapping from strength to dexterity mid-game does not require a full restart. Enemy despawn is another quietly smart system: kill a specific enemy enough times and it stops respawning, which means you can permanently clear a difficult run-back to a boss if you are willing to commit the effort. The Bonfire Ascetic lets you push a single area into a higher New Game cycle to respawn a boss and farm rare items, a sandbox tool that no other Souls game has replicated. PvP is broadly considered the strongest in the Dark Souls trilogy, with the community pointing to build diversity and combat pacing as the main reasons. On the worse side, and I will not sugarcoat it: the ADP (Adaptability) stat is a mess of communication. It governs your dodge invincibility frames, which means a new player rolling into a mob and getting hit mid-dodge will assume the hitboxes are broken when they just need to level a stat the game barely explains. The hitboxes have a genuine reputation problem too, not entirely unearned. A number of boss fights amount to little more than multi-enemy pile-ons rather than choreographed encounters, and long run-backs before some of those underwhelming bosses can erode goodwill fast. The PC port carries persistent limitations: keyboard and mouse support is poor, there is no ultrawide support, and the framerate is locked at 60. Play with a controller. The lore and world-building carry a specific atmosphere that I find genuinely underrated. Vendrick and Aldia are two of the more philosophically interesting characters FromSoftware has written, and the themes around hollowing, want, and the cyclical nature of power read better on a second playthrough than a first. Majula, the hub town perched above a cliffside sea, has an ambient melancholy that the series has not quite recaptured since. The non-linear early structure, where you are not locked into a single first area and can pursue multiple paths through Heide's Tower, the Forest of Fallen Giants, or Huntsman's Copse, gives the world a breadth that compensates for the occasionally incoherent geography. Bottom line for the RPG-inclined player: if you can make peace with the ADP learning curve and resist the urge to play it like Dark Souls 1, there is a genuinely deep game here with build variety and multiplayer systems the rest of the trilogy never bettered. If you hate the idea of a hidden stat gating your dodge rolls and you find multi-enemy boss rooms lazy design, your frustration will be valid and well-documented. It is not the strongest entry in the series by most measures, but it is the one the community cannot stop arguing about, and that alone says something.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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